Flooring to Ground a Space

When we’re developing a space, we tend to think a little more about what’s under our feet than what’s overhead, but often not much more.

The single best surface for any floor is hardwood stained a warmish shade with the grain shining through for all to clearly see—seeing wood grain helps us feel cooler, calmer, and more collected, which is good whether we’re hanging out with other people or trying to do something that requires lots of mental effort. Sometimes wood isn’t a good choice (you live, lucky dog, near the ocean and sand from trips to the sea will erode the wood, for example), but whenever it can reasonably be selected, it should be.  If wood can’t work, give a lot of thought to including some other natural material on the floor, for example slate (stone can be heavy, so it doesn’t work in all sorts of places).

Using some sort of artificial wood product on the floor can work, if that artificial wood product is so close to real that you truly can’t tell the difference—often artificial wood products are odd colours or smell chemically (for a very, very long time), which makes them a very undesirable option.  If the artificial wood planks (the fake wood can’t come in sheets to seem realistic) have a long “repeat” they are apt to seem more realistic.  A long “repeat” means that there is lots and lots of variation in the patterns seen in one piece compared to the next, as there is in any true wood floor.  If the same exact swirly thing happens in multiple pieces of flooring, it’s clearly manufactured; with real wood that swirly would be in only one piece (doubt that there’s much variation in the pattern in wood flooring, look at some when you get a chance or down now if you’re sitting over hardwood).

A carpet can protect your hardwood and carpets create zones in spaces—the area for travelling from one place to another (a pseudo-hallway perhaps across a large open space) or unify the sofa and chairs on it into a space to hang out with others or signal that the area around a desk is a work zone.  Wondering what your carpet should look like?  Read this article LINK we’ve written on patterns.

Ideally, the floor in a space should be the darkest colour plane in a room—that’s the colour distribution that humans prefer and find most comfortable.  You can make floors white or very light colours but be prepared for those very light floors to regularly look dirty and for people to skittle across them in search of a darker surface to stand on.  If you want people to move toward something or other, pair white and dark flooring.  People will move along a long white floored hallway at a good clip and hang out for hours in the terra cotta tiled kitchen at the end of it, for instance, or draw people toward a seating area by anchoring it with a dark rug on an otherwise whit-ish floor.

When floors have a glossy surface, they can be glare-y and perceived as slippery, although they may be easier to clean.  Whether a surface is hard or soft (say carpeted) also has a big effect on acoustics in a space and echoing quickly increases how stressed we feel.

We tend to keep walking on the same sort of surface, so if you want to lead people through a space, give them a same-surface path through it—for instance, if you want to encourage people to walk from your front door to your family room, make sure that the route is a single carpeted stretch and that other areas that people might wander into, for example, the living room, have a different sort of surface, perhaps they’re hardwood.  If you want people to move slowly though an area, perhaps so that they will look out the window and take in a view, carpet it; we move more slowly on carpeted surfaces than on bare floors—which is consistent with the fact that we feel more relaxed walking on carpeted surfaces than we do on wooden ones.

Carpet is regularly a good choice—it helps with the acoustics and places with carpets are generally seen as more comfortable than those without—but don’t run the carpet all the way to the wall if you have hardwood floors, keep a good margin of that wood shining through.

No matter how cute or clever, they may seem, don’t use flooring with optical illusions in it or high contrast patterns, both can impair travel through a space for people with less than perfect vision or who might be distracted, say because they’re looking at something on their cell phone.

Looking down and thinking about your floor can keep your experiences on the up and up.